The Mystery of LoveFrom "The Mystery of Love" by Marc GafniPosted by: DailyOM

Our lives are spent teetering on the edge of the void. You know the void -- the big hole you feel inside. Usually it is a dull and throbbing pain, the background noise of most lives. We rush around, doing everything we can to fill the hole. We have a handy word for this rushing about: avoidance. A dance around the void. We develop the most elaborate maneuverings we can imagine, never realizing that it is all a-void-dance. That if we could but taste fullness for a moment, then the vacant dances of consumerism, addiction, empty sex, and violence would be transformed into the erotic dance of Being.

The emptiness is so palpable and overwhelming that we would fill it at virtually any price. We seek immediate gratification -- a quick fix -- a book, a drug, a relationship, a job -- anything to fill the gaping hole in our wholeness. We run desperately looking for the next watering hole that might fill up the yawning chasm we feel so deeply and try so hard to hide.

On the outside our mad dashing about may look like a dance, but we are really gasping for air. Picture the image of a bee in a bottle. Seen from the outside the bee darts from side to side in an ecstatic dance. On the inside, however, there is neither dance nor ecstasy. The bee is slowly dying, suffocating. It was not meant to be this way. Life should not be a pathos-filled scramble for some snatches of authenticity in between empty charades.

The ancient wisdom of the great Hebrew mystics makes one essential promise: There is a better way to live. In the midst of uncertainty and anxiety, joy and meaning remain genuine options. We can choose life and love, or death and fear. To experience the fullness of every moment, to move from isolation to deep connection, is our birthright if we but claim it.

The great invitation of the spirit is to heal our pain, opening us up to the possibility of joy, ecstasy, and love. There is another way to dance: the dance of eros. The dance in which we all have a place. This book is about sharing the dance of eros with you.

As you probably know, most people assume that eros is merely a synonym for sex. It is not. The fact that we so often confuse eros with sex merely reminds us of how distant we are from true erotic engagement.

To dance with eros is to live and love erotically in all the arenas of our lives, beyond the merely sexual. That is what it means to be holy. Just as holiness should not be limited to our houses of worship, eros should not be limited to our bedrooms.

Eros is to be fully present to what is. It is to open your eyes and see for the first time the full beauty and gorgeousness of a friend. To smell the richness of an aroma, to feel the fullness of throbbing desire, and to taste the erotic experience that connects you with every being. It is to feel the palpable love that dissolves the walls of ego, anger, and anxiety.

Eros is the feeling you have when you stop trying to get someplace because you realize with great joy that you are already there. To be erotically engaged is to feel the radical interconnectivity of being as a living reality in your life. For the mystics, eros is the key that provides deep meaning to everything -- satisfying work, joyful relationships, effective parenting. Starvation, fundamentalism, greed, war, and the rape of the earth are all the result of lack of eros.

It is the mystery of eros that was at the core of the teachings of the Temple in ancient Jerusalem. I will call these teachings the path of Hebrew tantra. One of the meanings of the Sanskrit word tantra is "to expand." Hebrew tantra is about expanding eros beyond the sexual to include all the nonsexual areas of our lives. Hebrew tantra is a means of utilizing erotic energy to become one with the divinity that courses through us at every moment.

These ancient teachings about eros have never been taught publicly -- and for good reason. Read superficially, they could be misunderstood as merely sexual license or an abandonment of interpersonal ethics. As we shall see, however, they are neither. Rather, the Temple mysteries are a profound and powerful path of love and eros. For the Temple mystics the goal of life was erotic living. The essence of their teachings is to transform sexuality into a loving guide to fullness, eros, and joy.

As we shall see in chapter 1, at the epicenter of holiness in the ancient Hebrew Temple in Jerusalem was the Ark of the Covenant. You may remember it from the cinema -- it is the very same ark that Indiana Jones sought to retrieve in the classic movie Raiders of the Lost Ark. Atop this ark was carved a pair of figures called cherubs. Surprisingly the cherubs were locked in a sexual embrace. These entwined cherubs were not only atop the ark but were also the major decorative motif all over the temple walls, doors, and sacred vessels. Even if you absolutely affirm the sexual as a wonderful part of your life, sexually entwined cherubs at the axis mundi of holiness in the Jerusalem Temple creates a totally wild and provocative image. What might this mean?!

The ancient Temple in Jerusalem was the center of a society where the Hebrew mysteries were practiced and taught. At the core of the Temple mysteries lies an ancient set of radical understandings about sex, love, and eros. In the esoteric Temple mystery, it is sex that models for us what it might be like to live erotically in all dimensions of our lives.

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In the Hebrew tradition mysteries are meant to remain esoteric, secret. Therefore allow me to share with you why in our generation it is both permitted and even a sacred obligation to share these mysteries -- why I wrote this book! We live in an age when ancient wisdoms long relegated to the basements of the spirit are being reclaimed. The Zohar, the magnum opus of Hebrew mysticism, teaches that our era is the one in which the "gates of wisdom will be opened." For the first time, after several eons of intense spiritual evolution, we have the vessels to hold the light of the ancient secrets. The mystics suggest we may well be able to hold the light more deeply today than even the ancients for whom the wisdom was initially intended. It is only now, after the vessels of law, science, and ethics have been integrated into our psyches, that we can go back and fully reclaim eros and enchantment. It is in the service of the great Hebrew Goddess of Eros (Shechina) that I wrote this book.

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I am, or at least strive to be, a biblical mystic. I study, teach, and try to live the sacred texts at my spiritual community, Bayit Chadash, nestled in the hills of the Galilee in Israel, as well as at Oxford University in England. The Hebrew mystery texts have been my guides and friends for many years. Of course, like every mystic who engages sacred text, I hear the text in accordance with the inner melody of my soul. I now share this song with you in the form of this book. You are invited to find the place in your soul where you can receive and integrate this ancient wisdom into your own song.

You need not have studied mysticism or biblical myth in order to understand the concepts we will explore on our journey together. This book is for you if you seek a passionate, joyful, yet deeply grounded and serious exploration of the ancient mysteries as your guide to transformation.

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Here is the briefest outline of the journey we will undertake together. The mystery begins with the cherubs in the inner precincts of Solomon's sacred Temple in Jerusalem, unraveling the deep, wondrous, and provocative relationships between sex, eros, love, and the sacred. I devote the first two chapters to explaining the inner nature of eros.

After we understand the eros that lies at the heart of the Temple mysteries, we can then turn to answering our core question. If, as we shall show, the essence of the Temple -- and of every journey of the spirit -- is eros not sex, then why is sex such a prominent feature of the Temple? In response to this question we will explore the essence of the mystical secret of the cherubs in chapter 3.

After this discussion of the Hebrew mystery tradition, each of the remaining ten chapters lays out a unique path of Hebrew tantra modeled by the sexual. Each path will offer you a compelling spirit map for living erotically in every facet of your being. Those paths form the essence of the ancient Hebrew tantric mysteries of love.

The invitation and the challenge of the spirit in our generation is to create a politics of eros and love. That can only begin to happen when each person in the polis takes responsibility for the erotic quality of his or her life. We need to, and we can, realign our souls with the vital currents of loving energy that course though our universe. We can decide to enter the flow, and from that place on the inside we can transform first our lives and, ultimately, our planet.

May we be escorted through these pages by the spirit of eros.
May word meld with word merge with heart move to hand
that we should hold the world a little lighter,
with a little more love than before.

Let this be not a monologue but a sacred conversation. Share with me your words, your thoughts, the poetry of your soul, and I will be honored to receive: rmgafni@netvision.net.il.